Apparently the state has to approve the software NYC wants to use. Let’s hope the various governmental actors do not screw this up. In four special elections for city council, the Board of Elections had to tally all the votes by hand, for lack of software available to do this. From The City:

For the four special elections for City Council held in February and March, the BOE tallied thousands of paper ballots manually because a software platform was not yet in place.

Staffers sifted through the ballots one by one, kept handwritten tallies of the votes cast and placed the ballots in plastic bins marked for each candidate.

Workers then took ballots in the box with the fewest cast and redistributed each to the box matching the next choice on the voters’ lists, repeating the process until two finalists remained and the one with the most votes won.

In the southeast Queens contest to replace former Council member and current Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, the first of nine rounds of manual ranking took roughly seven hours. Selvena Brooks-Powers emerged as the winner after a three-day count of some 7,000 ballots.

State Board of Elections staff are still in the process of testing the software that the city board seeks to use to tabulate rankings and will make a recommendation on May 25, said John Conklin, a spokesperson for the state board.

The proposed software is based on the open-source RCV Universal Tabulator, which has been usedin Utah and Michigan.
“The state board is working with its testing partners to examine the software and technical documentation submitted, and perform the necessary functional and security testing to ensure compliance with all relevant statutes and regulations,” Conklin said in a statement. “The certification process is on schedule.”